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Introduction

“To hold up the lamp of nature to man himself.” That was the way that one Enlightenment philosophe described the use of the scientific method in order to understand the most complex machine – a human being. David Hume wanted to make a name for himself by using the scientific method to understand the mind. More than anything else, he wanted to discover how the mind acquired and processed information. Only then, he argued, could we ever hope to find out what it was possible for the mind to know.

Hume was the greatest ever explorer of the human mind. He invented modern philosophy by showing us that there are strict limits to human understanding. After Hume, many philosophers gave up trying to develop intellectual systems that explained the universe and the place of mankind within it. He accomplished his goal in a work entitled A Treatise on Human Understanding (1739) that was little read in his own time, but became one of the greatest works in the philosophical canon.

Hume took scientific and philosophic inquiry into a very dark and narrow place by suggesting that humans were mistaken if they thought that they could create systems to explain either the world or themselves in it. He claimed that the mind was a trickster that grouped scattered phenomena by custom and habit. The natural propensity of the mind was to pretend to explain things that it patently could not. Over the last two thousand years, humans had been occupied devising imaginative explanations for things they could never hope to understand.

Hume’s Common Sense Approach

We will never be able to discover the essence of the mind, said Hume, just as we cannot hope to discover the essence of material objects. We shouldn’t waste our time on tasks that we know are fruitless. What we can hope to do, however, is to observe the way the mind works “from a cautious observation of human life as it operates in the common course of the world.” We should be guided by our common sense and beware of believing that we can ever hope to discover absolute truths or eternal axioms in the Cartesian sense. It is merely sufficient that we gain a better idea of what is going on. We want to be able to describe the operations of the mind common sensically rather than take any risk of getting lost in logical quibbles.

How is it that we know anything at all?, asks Hume, starting from first principles. He answers the question in typical empiricist fashion. The only way we know anything is through the senses. The perceptions that we have of the sense data take two forms. The first kind is impressions that strike the mind directly and forcefully. These include the impression that we have when we look at the colour red or when we taste a banana. The second kind of impressions that we have is ideas that are thought rather than felt. They are similar to sense impressions except that they are weaker. A simple idea might be that of the sweetness of a banana that has a close resemblance to the sensation that we get when be bite into one.

Hume’s point is that ideas must always follow the impressions we receive through the senses. We can never have an idea without a corresponding impression. We can never know whether anything exists outside of those impressions. Unlike Descartes, we cannot even surmise that something called matter exists or that a God, who supposedly created matter, exists. All that we can ever know are our impressions and our ideas of those impressions.

Innate Ideas Cannot Exist

Impressions are prior to ideas in every case that we can think of, says Hume. It’s ludicrous to try to conceive an idea without reference to a corresponding impression. Thus, there can be no innate or a priori ideas.

There are two kinds of ideas, however, and this is what inevitably leads thinkers into error. In addition to the simple ideas that correspond directly to our impressions, there are more complex ideas for which the correspondence is difficult to detect. But, if we look at these complex ideas closely, take them apart so to speak, we will find that they are composed of a series of simple ideas that are all connected to the impressions derived from our senses.

To the rationalists who believe that there exist clear and distinct ideas that are self-referential, Hume says prove it. He argues that he cannot conceive of any idea that exists independent of the senses. A close look at the way the human mind works suggests that we link together simple ideas into more complex ideas. There is a certain logic to the process that intrigues Hume. There’s really no reason why these ideas couldn’t be lumped together in a totally disorganized and haphazard fashion. But simple ideas clearly get linked to other simple ideas in an orderly way. Hume says that one “idea naturally introduces another” and human thought proceeds in a consistent way. Without this consistency, we humans would be incapable of communicating with one another and engaging in united action. Apart from registering and sharing simple ideas, human society would be the Tower of Babel.

Hume is fascinated by the way the mind creates complex ideas. Certain ideas, he says, appear to be brought together by a “gentle force.” This association of ideas has three basic structures. They are resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and cause and effect. When something resembles something else, we tend to associate them together. When people look very much alike, we suspect, for example, that they come from the same family. Contiguity refers to the fact that two things are in the same place at the same time. If you see me and a woman together in the same place at the same and different times, you are entitled to suspect that we are connected somehow. The final structure, cause and effect, is the most important in the case of scientific and philosophical systems. Resemblance and contiguity really can’t supply us with reliable information unless we can also assume the necessary connection of causation. Thus, two people might look alike and appear in similar places at similar times, but unless we know that they are the offspring of the same cause or that there is a close relationship between them, we don’t really have an iron clad guarantee that they are connected.

Dismantling Cause and Effect

Resemblance, contiguity and cause and effect are the guiding principles of the mind. They serve a similar function for the mind that gravity does in the physical world. They are absolutely indispensable to having any knowledge at all. All of our complex ideas rely on these three principles, two of which are rather weak and possibly spurious. Only cause and effect really allows us to establish a clear relationship between objects and ideas. Cause and effect is the mortar that allows us to build structures out of the brick like impressions that strike the mind. Cause and effect is the only principle that clearly goes beyond our senses and provides us with information about those things that we cannot see or feel. Cause and effect is the only principle that allows us to make predictions about the future.

What is this cause and effect thing?, asks Hume. Obviously, it denotes a relationship of some kind. That relationship involves two objects being in proximity to one another at the same time or contiguity. It also implies that one object is prior to another, in other words, a cause comes before an effect. Any cause that was contemporary or simultaneous with its effect would be destroyed. So the cause and effect relationship always involves both contiguity and succession.

Where does that leave us? In a rigorous analytical sense, it leaves us nowhere. We still cannot discover anything like a necessary connection between a cause and an effect. If causation really exists, we ought to be able to explain it, but that’s not as easy to do as it might first appear. For example, you might argue that cause and effect is a maxim that simply cannot be doubted. Everything must have a beginning or a cause; something can never come out of nothing. Hume would reply that you are simply repeating the concept of cause and effect in different words. You haven’t proven anything. Why should anyone believe that everything that exists has a cause? Do you believe in God? Did he have a cause? We are no closer to the necessary connection between cause and effect.

In order to get to the bottom of the cause and effect principle, Hume suggests that we perform some simple case studies. Experience tells us that every time we put our fingers in the flame of a candle, we feel the heat. Stick your finger in the flame for too long and you will get burnt. Even the smallest child, after one or two bad experiences, makes the causal connection. Because of the constant conjunction of flame and heat or pain, we conclude that there must be a cause and effect relationship between the flame and the sensation of pain. In other words, our practical experience leads us to believe in a necessary connection.

This experience, however, does not really explain the relationship between a cause and effect. There needs to be an impression that comes between the flame and the pain to explain the phenomenon, since our only trustworthy information comes from impressions. For example, how do we know that the next time we put our finger in the flame that we will feel pain? No necessary connection guarantees that the flame will burn us the next time, or even that the sun will rise tomorrow. Just because the sun has risen every day in or lives, that does not mean it will rise tomorrow. Just because the only impressions we’ve had so far is of white swans, that doesn’t mean that all swans are white. In fact, some swans are black.

Hume wants us to stop and think about this. Apart from the information that we get from our senses, cause and effect is the only relationship that can lead us to new knowledge. But cause and effect is far from being airtight. It is neither intuitively nor demonstrably certain. It is based overwhelmingly on past experience.

For those who might try to evade Hume’s argument by substituting words like power or efficacy in place of cause and effect, Hume adopts a different logical approach. Let’s assume that, in a particular instance, a power relationship implies an effect. That still doesn’t mean that similar power relationships will occur in the future. No one can ever form conclusive predictions about future events on the basis of past events. Whatever words you use to describe it, cause and effect boils down to an expectation informed by constant conjunction.

Thus far, what we call cause and effect appears to be founded in a future prediction based on constant conjunctions in the past. In other words, we believe that what happened in the past will happen in the future. Cause and effect is based on belief rather than logical or experiential certainty. We do not know that cause and effect is true; we believe that it is true.

Belief

Hume’s philosophy argues that most significant human knowledge is based on belief rather than certainty. This belief, in turn, is the product of experience or, as Hume puts it, the product of custom and habit. Because something happened in the past, human beings think it will happen in the future.

Hume’s Philosophy of Belief

If belief rather than certainty is the key to human understanding, it is important to get a better handle on what exactly belief is. In order to explain belief, Hume appeals to the common sense of his readers. He suggests that belief is not something that exists in ideas themselves. If someone believes a newspaper article, but another doesn’t, that does not necessarily mean that we have a different understanding of the ideas presented in the article. We could have identical understandings. But someone will feel differently about the article than another. Someone will feel what Hume calls a certain firmness or vivacity (conviction) about the information that another would not. Someone will enter into the ideas presented more strongly than another will.

It’s the human mind that makes all the difference here, not the ideas themselves. The difference lies not in the ideas themselves or even the impressions that those ideas create. Belief is something that is felt by the mind. Belief is something that is generated when the natural association of ideas combines with our customs and habits. Custom and habit are the past experiences that lead us to believe in the existence of a necessary relationship. In other words, cause and effect is not a relationship between the objects themselves (the flame and the pain) but a psychological principle of the mind.

Cause and Effect

Hume revolutionized science and philosophy by showing us that cause and effect is a psychological character of the mind. We cannot prove that it exists in nature or logically. It is simply the way that the human mind sifts and organizes impressions and ideas.

“Don’t get lazy, dear readers,” says Hume. “Don’t say, ‘Oh yes, I see; that makes sense, and then go back to sleep’.” Consider the implications of this discovery. Consider that

I have just now examined one of the most sublime questions in philosophy, viz., ‘that concerning the power and efficacy of causes’; where all the sciences seem so much interested.

Wake up, readers and students, says Hume and smell reality. Everyone who believes in the existence of scientific laws now faces a dilemma. Cause and effect, the basis of all science, doesn’t exist in human nature; it only resides in the mind. Science is at best a paradigm for organizing information. It isn’t and never will be truth.

The great philosophers of the past come in for even more criticism from Hume. Most of their ideas Hume finds ridiculous. For example, how can Plato possibly invent such rubbish as ideal forms? All that we can know with any certainty comes from the senses. The structures of reason and logic are not based on eternal truth; they are merely the tendency of the mind to believe certain things. While this information might prove useful when it comes to avoiding burning our fingers in a flame, it is not nearly a strong enough foundation for metaphysics. As for Descartes, all of his clear and distinct ideas are based on cause and effect. How can Descartes build such complex intellectual structures on such a weak and flimsy principle as the belief in a cause and effect relationship?

Hume goes much further by suggesting that vulgar intelligence, or ordinary common sense, is superior to the most refined academic understanding. Academics and philosophers are adept at building castles in the air that have no real substance. Most of this information is irrelevant to ordinary social life. At best, it is a playful distraction. But, if we take philosophical or scientific systems too seriously, they can be dangerous. Those who want to transform social life to fit their rationalist systems should be listened to with the greatest caution.

Hume on Imagination

Having demolished the foundation of abstract reasoning about the natural world, Hume went on to challenge the existence of external objects. In the well-established empirical tradition, Hume claimed that we could never know if there was an objective existence apart from our sense expressions. It made no sense to ask this question, much less to try to prove it as Descartes attempted. A far more interesting question to ask, said Hume, was why we have this notion of external bodies in the first place.

We believe two interrelated things when we think that there are external objects, Hume suggested. First, we believe that objects have a continued existence even after we stop experiencing them with our senses. Second, we believe that this existence is distinct from our mind and our senses.

Why should we assume that objects continue to have existence after we cease to perceive them? The senses do not provide us with sufficient information to support this belief. All the senses can ever tell us is about the impressions that strike them. The senses have no power to guarantee a distinct reality out there. At best, the senses inform us of the representation of a supposed reality – in other words images rather than objects. Clearly the notion of distinct and continuous objects is a mental fiction.

This mental fiction, however, should be of interest to every student of the human mind. Why do we persist in a belief for which there is no logical grounds? Hume is fascinated by what seems natural rather than logical for the human mind. For this reason, he distinguished between the understanding of the vulgar (ordinary people) and the learned (academics, philosophers, scientists). Both the learned and the vulgar, for example, believe in motion and extension in space. But the learned do no have the same trust in such secondary qualities as tastes and colours. And yet both primary and secondary qualities are equally dependent on the senses and equally suspect.

Without ever consulting axioms or principles, the average joe and judy believe in the real and continuous existence of both primary and secondary qualities. Therefore, it is natural for human beings to belief in them. Even the philosophers who deny the existence of secondary qualities, such as Descartes, act in their everyday lives as if they believe in them. In their everyday lives in society, they act the same as children who think that philosophical abstractions are silly. Why is this, says Hume? Why is it that people routinely and naturally practice faulty reasoning? This has nothing to do with their understanding. Rather, it is because they have something called imagination.

Bear with me while we conduct a little experiment to help use figure out how the imagination works. If I look at my daughter Lara and then turn a way for a moment in order to do something else, I assume that, when I turn back, I will receive an impression of Lara that is remarkably similar to the one I had before I turned away. Now, that does not mean that Lara will not have changed during that brief moment in time. I am not simply referring to a change of position or expression here, since, as we all know, Lara is one of those fascinating individuals who changes from moment to moment. Despite that, there is a certain coherence in my impression of Lara. The impression that I have now will still strongly resemble the one I had before I turned away. And, what is more important, I have a distinct feeling of a certain constancy about the admittedly changing Lara as I have about all the objects that I perceive as external to me. This feeling of constancy is quite different than the feeling that I have about impressions that refer to no external objects. There is no such constancy, for example, that can be applied to my impressions or feelings of happiness or sadness. These feelings are up and down or all around, what Hume would call wayward. The feelings that have with regard to Lara as an object have a particular kind of constancy.

What I am doing in the case of Lara and other objects is this: I am making a leap of imagination in order to connect my past impressions with my present impression. By this time, you should realize that there is no logical basis for this belief; rather, it is a way of preventing what might otherwise appear to be a contradiction. Experience causes us to realize that later impressions resemble earlier ones. Unless we want to feel that our first impression has been totally annihilated, and that the second impression is a totally new one, we are led to use our imagination to fill the gap. We imagine the continued existence of a supposed object that created the impression. This means, in effect, that we have to posit a cause of the impression outside of our own perceptions. Our imagination, rather than our reason, gives external objects their existence.

Because this use of our imagination is so habitual, and indeed happens thousands of times a day, we pay very little attention to it. Hume wants us to pay very close attention to the interruption in impressions that causes us to ascribe a perfectly distinct identity to some object. He wants us to appreciate that this action has absolutely no rational basis but, rather, is a trick of the imagination. The imagination is a wonderful magician. You don’t have to be the slightest bit rational to work this magical trick. Children do it very early on – from at least the age of 3 months as cognitive psychologists like Piaget tell us. If you take a toy away from a tiny baby, that toy will cease to exist for the baby. But, after just a few months, something called object retention occurs and the baby will look for the object that you have taken away from its line of vision. This activity, Hume says, is natural. That doesn’t make it any easier to explain and, in fact, it can’t be explained in logico-rational terms at all.

Hume on the Self

Having destroyed the notion of external reality on philosophical grounds, while simultaneously justifying its naturalness in the context of human understanding, Hume goes on to attack the thorny problem of the self. Descartes invented the modern self by suggesting that the cogito was the one thing that we could be absolutely sure of. While we could not be certain of our existence as a body, at least not until God came into the picture, at least we could be sure of ourselves as thinking beings or as minds.

Hume’s reply to Descartes is that he has uttered a load of rubbish. All that we can ever be sure of is the sense impressions we receive. Moreover, there is absolutely no impression that could ever give rise to such a complex idea as that of a unique and individual self. On the contrary, our impressions are so variable; so many different impressions strike us at the same time; and this shifting information is all we will ever know. In order to take the concept of myself seriously, says Hume, I would need to be able to relate it to some perception. The self cannot exist apart from perception. But show me anyone who really knows himself or herself as something other than a complex bundle of impressions, says Hume, and I’ll show you an idiot or a liar. There is nothing in our experience that is simple and continues enough on which to build a self. “I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind,” says Hume, “that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.” “Our eyes,” he continues tersely, “cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions.”

Having demolished the concept of the self, Hume moves on to discuss the significance of the concept. Hume is not simply destructive, as many modern philosophers like to suggest. What he wants to discover, as in the case of external objects, is how exactly we come to have a belief in ourselves. Even before we are rationally aware of it, we create an identity for ourselves that we surrender with considerable reluctance and usually then only for short periods of time.

The underpinning of our belief in ourselves, once again, is imagination. We imagine the existence of objects apart from our impressions in order to bridge the gap between past and present impressions. In this way, Hume says, we confound relation with identity. It will now take a considerable amount of change in our impressions to believe that either ourselves or other beings have been transformed into something different. This phenomenon has been explored by cognitive psychologists who perform experiments with visualization. They show subjects draws of a dog that gradually changes into a cat. Subjects prove to be highly resistant to seeing the cat as it develops. Similarly, says Hume, a ship will have to sustain a considerable amount of damage before we regard it as a shipwreck rather than a ship. Even when it is no more than a few floating planks, we still tend to think of those planks as part of a former ship. I may change dramatically over the years, but I will still think of I as me.

The mind is no more than a serious of impressions. However, it is natural for us to untie those impressions according to three basic principles: resemblance, contiguity and causation. But, when it comes to understanding our own minds, the place where impressions tend to succeed one another rather than come together in place and time, we are primarily concerned with resemblance and causation. Resemblance causes us to link together all past impressions in a kind of chain, thereby making the whole seem like the continuation of one object. Causation causes us to connect simple ideas into more complex structures. The entire process results in a form of government, as Hume puts it, in the mind, in which we order things in terms of subordination and superordination. The whole, willy nilly, becomes much more meaningful that the sum of its parts. The parts can be altered, but we will still attribute a continued existence to the whole, just as we did in the case of the drastically altered ship, and just as we do in the case of our selves.

Memory, of course, is the chief tool that allows us to discover our personal identities. It does not, however, create it. We have a notion of our identity far past the place our memory extends. I have no recollection of what I did or how I felt when I was six, but I have a clear notion that John Dwyer existed over 44 years ago. That idea I have because of my belief in the relation of cause and effect among my different perceptions. While memory does not create my personal identity, however, it does allow me to discover it. Without the memory of some of the impressions from the past that we relate in terms of cause and effect, we could never have a distinct notion of ourselves.

So, the concept of the self is a neat little fiction. We can alter significantly, but we will still think of ourselves as the same person. And yet, I am a very different character both in appearance and nature, from when I went to university as a naïve young student and failed most of my courses. What is even more fascinating, I still think of myself as the same person as well. All that I have to go by is my perceptions, my particular perceptions. Or rather, perceptions are all that I have to go by if I try to understand myself rationally. It is only the faith I have in my ability to create imaginary fictions that allows me to have a feeling of myself and an external world outside of my senses.

In the process of playing these imaginary tricks, however, I’ve subverted human understanding. Haven’t I, in Hume’s words, “cut off entirely all science and philosophy” as a way of understanding my world and myself? Pushing the principle even further, haven’t I rejected reason altogether? In an important sense yes I have.

The Humean Irony

If you have been following Hume’s argument so far, you might be wondering whether or not he is involved in a logically fallacy. Hasn’t Hume used a considerable amount of reason and logic to prove that reason is unable to explain our world or us? Isn’t Hume’s argument a model of rationality and close logic? You can imagine ‘le Bon David’ chuckling at this point. He’s well aware that the snake has swallowed its own tail. Reason destroys itself. What Hume leaves us is a choice between a reason that is patently false or no reason at all. Ultimately, what Hume wants his readers to understand is that they wander into error whenever they move very far from the natural operations of the human mind and imagination.

Hume on Religion

Hume’s attack on religion cost him a professorship at Edinburgh University, a position that he dearly desired. Even the more enlightened members of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, who supported their friend Hume in most things and kept trying to get him to soften his views, threw up their hands when Hume published his famous attack on religion. But Hume’s writings on religion were entirely consistent with his analysis of human understanding. If we cannot prove that the self or the external world exists, says Hume, it is absurd to talk about the existence of God. There is no sense impression whatsoever that could ever lead us to a conception of god. And, since there are no innate ideas, we cannot look for God internally. All our knowledge derives from the senses, and when we die, our reality is annihilated. Don’t expect life after death, Hume argued.

The position is logically consistent. The question for the intellectual history is why Hume wouldn’t avoid religious controversy? Why did he consider it necessary to discuss religious abstractions? Some writers have pointed to Hume’s distaste for religious fanaticism, and especially the Roman Catholic Church, as sufficient reason for his anti-religious agenda. While it is certainly true that David Hume, his friend Adam Smith, and enlightened writers generally were highly critical of dogmatic religion, that fact still does not explain Hume’s need to write extensively against all forms of religion.

In order to understand Hume’s agenda, we need to look at the enlightened form of religion that was emerging in the eighteenth-century rather than the medieval religious beliefs that were under attack from all sides of the enlightenment. Hume focused his attack on the Deist conception of God, modern rational religion, because French writers used this rationalistic religion to support their mechanical and logical theories of society. For the Deist’s, God was the creator of an orderly nature that contrasted sharply with an irrational society. God was also the First Cause, the ultimate principle that underpinned the cause and effect relationships that Hume was concerned to demolish. Hume equally disliked rational religious, political, and social systems because they were used to justify radical change. Ironically, it was Hume’s conservatism that led him to attack modern forms of religion.

Hume demonstrated that cause and effect was something the originated in our imagination. Causality did not exist in nature or in reason. If nature was not characterized by law and order, Hume argued that it was ridiculous to deduce a supreme being that created a clockwork universe. Even if one were foolish enough to believe in clockwork universe, argued Hume, the Deist argument would still be absurd. Complex machines were usually created by more than one man; why couldn’t a number of gods come together to create a supposedly clockwork universe.

Hume’s attack on the Deists was vicious and totally out of line with the general tenor of the Enlightenment. It made him a lot of enemies, who he always treated in a good-natured way. Only once did he waver from his position, although it cannot be considered serious. One night after a little too much claret (smuggled from France), he fell into a mud hole off an Edinburgh street – Edinburgh being a very mucky place before the New Town was built. A little old lady came by and Hume asked her to help him out. “Aren’t you David Hume, the atheist,” she asked. “Yes,” replied Hume honestly. “Then I shall not help you out,” said the old lady. Upon this, Hume quickly replied, “I believe, I believe,” after which the old lady kindly pulled him out of the muck. When Hume was dying, a fellow Edinburgh writer asked Hume why he took the risk of refusing to believe in God when he couldn’t prove or disprove God’s existence. Hume took a piece of paper, crunched it up, and threw it into the fireplace next to his sickbed. He said, “I can’t disprove that this paper will burn up, but I’ll bet you that it does.” Hume’s death was well described by his friend Adam Smith, and he kept his sense of humour and his rejection of religion right up to its painful end.

Of course, Hume had no time for religion of any kind. He ridiculed the notion of revealed religion and, especially, the possibility of miracles. Nothing in human experience, he argued, furnished any indication that miracles ever occurred. The belief in miracles was as ludicrous as the belief in superstition. The testimony of a few nuts as to the supposed working of some supposed God could not compare to the entire weight of human experience on the way that nature operated. Like philosophical abstractions, revealed religion led nowhere.

While they respected Humean skepticism, and many of them may have been closet agnostics, Hume’s contemporaries were reluctant to join in his attack on religion. Some, like Adam Smith, appear to have feared the social consequences of a godless society. Hume’s attack on religion certainly was one of the main reasons that his philosophy was shunned much more in his own time than our own.

Hume’s Philosophy: Implications and Context

How can we sum up Hume’s philosophy? Ironically, despite his deconstruction of science, philosophy and theology, Hume’s writings were an affirmation of community and everyday life. The attack on the self should not mislead us into thinking that Hume’s philosophy was personally destructive. In fact, Hume’s purpose was to reinforce an appreciation of ordinary life and the pleasure of society. Humean philosophy was an argument for a certain kind of indolence with respect to the subtleties and sophistries of philosophy. Having proven that reason was faulty, Hume could stop worry about trying to discover the meaning of human life and could begin to appreciate it in a natural way. Hume’s brilliant destruction of the ‘goddess of Reason’ and the ‘Deist god’ allowed him to be what he called a “natural and agreeable fool” instead of a “dreary philosopher.” And he could play this role in good conscience, since he had proven that philosophy leads us nowhere.

Hume’s arguments were much more than an apology for his good-humoured life. One of the primary purposes of Humean philosophy was to challenge the French philosophes that sought to create a rational and orderly society. While he sympathized with their frustration with superstition, injustice, and economic backwardness, Hume believed that French philosophers were frightening people. What French writers failed to appreciate was that human societies were based on custom and habit; they could not be changed overnight. The best one could hope for was gradual progress. The reason that England had made the progress that it did was that it changed slowly under the guidance of the aristocracy, gentry and social institutions. To think that one could turn France into a mirror of England overnight, either through enlightened despotism or social revolution, was to completely misunderstand the way the human mind and human societies evolved.

Hume’s philosophy may have been radical, but its message was socially conservative without being traditionalist. He was one of the first to point to the socially irresponsible characteristics of modern science and philosophy. He believed in moderate progress but he attacked ideas of social reconstruction. His touchstone was the community, which, whenever in doubt, favoured a conservative approach. Thus, Hume can be called the father of modern conservatism.

An Essay of Human Understanding, in Hume’s own words, “fell stillborn from the press.” It is one of those unusual works that has become much more important in our own age than when it was published in the eighteenth-century. Hume’s contemporary influence stemmed jointly from his History of England and the many essays that he composed on practical morality and polite manners. Hume did not refocus his energies in these areas because he was disappointed in the reaction to his philosophy. Quite the contrary, Hume believed that he had demonstrated the limits of human understanding in these areas. Much more important, he believed, was to increase our appreciation for the past and for the human customs and habits on which all lasting progress would depend. Hume, in effect, practiced what he preached. Philosophy and science were as overrated as they were undependable.